The most sensitive part of a modern aircraft wing is just aft of the leading edge where the flow makes the transition from subsonic to transonic. Having even 'frosting' in this area can destroy all lift from a wing so they are liberally sprayed with gelatinous treatments that are specially formulated to melt any ice that forms from rain or snow while the aircraft is static, yet become sufficiently diluted during the take off to be washed of the wing for flight.

Once airborne, the problem becomes one of thermal balance and heat is supplied to the wing leading edges using engine bleed air.

The bugs don't affect icing and so far, no coating has been found that cna get rid of ice under all conditions mandated by the FAA.

Regardless of whether or not the 'Frequent Contributor' writes anything worth reading (he doesn't; water bottle delivery at a hippy festival ffs?) when/. posts anything written by the venerable Bennett they know two things:

1. Massive clickbait to sell to advertisers.

2. Not a single positive comment from their contributors.

It's a sad situation that I come to this site to read the insights of fellow slashdotters, from whom I have learned a great deal, when my visit is earning money for a set of cynical pondlife amoeba like Dice. I guess I'm going to spend more time on stack from now on.

Technically it could be built, of course, but all it will do is save a few metres of runway. It won't affect the amount of fuel an aircraft has to carry nor the thrust its engines have to produce. I don't even want to think about the failure modes....

DRM is a terrible idea, of course, but there is a more sinister movement taking place, which is the gradual transfer of music to streaming services.

So long as we can still buy real hard copies of the music such as CD, download or even vinyl then we retain personal control over our collections. I can imagine that in the future new music will only be available on DRM-corrupted streaming services and we will have no choice but to subscribe to one or another of them.

Wish I could find the link, but a couple of days ago I chanced upon a site that described a Python library that would build the gui automatically just by defining some very simple hooks in the body of the code. It was totally ugly utilitarian stuff for science labs, but it meant that even the Fortran refugees could make guis. Anyone know what this was?

The Boeing 787 shows the pitfalls of outsourcing in aerospace. We are way more conservative now in any outsourcing; it has to be 'monkey' work following very strict processes that we develop and debug on site before hand. The key thing is that all the creative, IP generating work is kept in Europe and only the really mundane stuff goes offshore.

There is always the unvocalised issue that any IP sent to an Indian outsourcing company will be stolen.

Rubbish. I've been running since I was 18 but I just got my best ever marathon and half-marathon results at age 49, (2:57 and 1:22) Work has forced a year off this year but I expect to go even quicker next year.

The US take this very seriously. I designed a system that is part of the F-35. My UK company with it's US partner set up a critical test at a Boeing facility and I was sent over to run it. I arrived on site to be told I didn't have clearance to even watch the tests because I was not a US citizen and it would take six months to get me clearance. Boeing said that if I I was caught I would go to jail and they could be shut down.

One of the reasons that Nokia took pretty much the whole market for Windows Phone was the Here suite of apps; turn by turn navigation, public transport routing, live traffic, downloadable maps and local discovery and all of it integrated into the OS. Very slick. The other reason was the cameras, of course.

I honestly can't remember the last time I had a problem with a device driver in either Windows or Linux. Maybe I got lucky? Back in Ubuntu Warty days I remember it being a major project to get a scanner to work, but for the last few years Simple Scan on Ubuntu has *just worked* even for networked scanners. With Windows the print function worked but it had to install a Metro App to run the scanner (which it did automatically) I wasn't sure I was completely happy with this behaviour, but at least I didn't have to install the, always hideous, HP bloatware suite.